Abstract: In a large-scale quantum computer, the cost of communications will dominate
the performance and resource requirements, place many severe demands on the
technology, and constrain the architecture. Unfortunately, fault-tolerant
computers based entirely on photons with probabilistic gates, though equipped
with "built-in" communication, have very large resource overheads; likewise,
computers with reliable probabilistic gates between photons or quantum memories
may lack sufficient communication resources in the presence of realistic
optical losses. Here, we consider a compromise architecture, in which
semiconductor spin qubits are coupled by bright laser pulses through
nanophotonic waveguides and cavities using a combination of frequent
probabilistic and sparse determinstic entanglement mechanisms. The large
photonic resource requirements incurred by the use of probabilistic gates for
quantum communication are mitigated in part by the potential high-speed
operation of the semiconductor nanophotonic hardware. The system employs
topological cluster-state quantum error correction for achieving
fault-tolerance. Our results suggest that such an architecture/technology
combination has the potential to scale to a system capable of attacking
classically intractable computational problems.